A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Monday, September 17, 2018

THE BALLOT THAT IS VS. THE ONE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS“WHY THE BALLOT THAT IS LACKS PROPS
THAT COULD HAVE BEEN”

Folks
with little faith in California voters have won at least a partial victory this
year. For decades, since the great Progressive (a tag worn a century ago mostly
by moderate Republicans) Gov. Hiram Johnson created the ballot initiative,
critics have railed against direct democracy, claiming an uninformed public
often makes major mistakes.

After
decades of griping about “budgeting by initiative,” those skeptics managed to
get a law passed in 2014 allowing legislators to change or eliminate
initiatives even after they’ve qualified for the ballot, so long as initiative
sponsors agree to it.

Voters
will see the first results of that law this fall: A significantly shorter
ballot than they would otherwise have encountered, even though 11 measures
remain up for public decisions.

Yes,
voters will make thumbs up or down choices on issues from $17 billion in
proposed bonds to rent control and repeal of last year’s gasoline tax increase.
They will still get to determine whether veal calves, pigs and chickens get
more rights than they now enjoy and whether folks over 55 will be able to carry
their Proposition 13 property tax limits across all county lines when they sell
their homes, instead of just some.

But
voters will not get to make decisions about consumer privacy or soda taxes or
even who will pay to clean up leaded paint in homes built since 1951.

Instead,
sponsors who gathered enough voter signatures to put initiatives on those
issues before the voters made deals with state legislators and their ballot
measures vanished.

So
a ballot that could have been much more interesting disappeared in the face of
compromises that satisfied big-money interests but might not have pleased the
mass of voters.

The
farthest-reaching of these compromises involved Internet consumer privacy.
Under new rules signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown just two hours after they
passed the Legislature, Californians now have a right to know what information
Internet giants like Google and Yahoo and eBay and Amazon have about them. They
can also prohibit companies from selling that information and can ask companies
to delete their information after they learn what’s been gathered.

That’s
a far cry from the ballot initiative which this new law replaces, which would
have forced companies to get consumer permission to gather, maintain and sell
information on what Internet searches individuals make, what they buy on the
‘Net, what products they look at but don’t buy and much more.

Consumers
can only sue in the case of a large leak of information, not over individual
exposures.

This
was an example of compromise of the sort intended by lawmakers who created the
new system for removing initiatives after they qualify. It probably headed off
a campaign that would have cost companies and consumer groups $50 million or
more. Too bad for the television, radio, newspaper and direct mail companies
that would likely have gleaned most of that money.

Another
compromise removed an initiative run by major paint makers aiming to force the
state to loan the companies up to $2 billion for removal of paint that contains
lead in 10 cities and counties that won a lawsuit against Sherwin-Williams, du
Pont and others. The initiative was withdrawn in exchange for legislators
pulling three bills that would have penalized the companies even more.

And
there were soda taxes. Makers of carbonated drinks had qualified an initiative
that would have raised the vote-percentage threshold for passing any new local
tax, but agreed to pull it off the ballot in exchange for a new law placing a
13-year moratorium on any new soda taxes.

The
result is a ballot that’s far from the longest ever seen by California voters,
but still lets them make important decisions on issues like spreading rent
control more widely and lowering gas taxes a bit. But it also isn’t quite the
ballot it could have been, as three key choices were gone even before campaigns
on them could get started.

-30-

Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.